Sequence 7 parts 2012–2018
Against Credentialism
A degree can be valuable even when its holder learns very little. That should bother those of us who teach.
Academically Adrift’s Methodological Shipwreck
On Tuesday we had a university-wide faculty meeting on revising the general education requirements at Morgan State, and predictably President Wilson held up a copy of Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift and made some comments about how we had to do better while horribly mangling the actual findings of the book. Though there’s a lot…
Academically Adrift: How a First-Year Seminar Can Get the Academy Back on Course
What follows is a proposal I’ve been working on to convince my university to switch from its General Education requirements to a first-year seminary, given the data in Academically Adrift . Executive Summary The best research available suggests that courses with demanding reading and writing requirements are the only way to teach the core competencies…
The Teleological Paradox in Utilitarianism and Education
In my brief response to Community College Dean a few weeks back , I said something that I think is pretty obvious, but that is often ignored: humanities advocates spend so much time fighting the instrumental approach to education [because] you’ve got to pretend like time doesn’t matter, or else the education won’t work. Consider the…
Foucault on Education and Human Capital
From Foucault’s Collège de France lecture on March 14th, 1979 (in what the publisher has misnamed The Birth of Biopolitics despite the fact that that year’s lectures basically spelled the end of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and focused on the limitation of state control over the market): What does it mean to form human capital,…
Is “College for All” among the Ruling Ideas?
I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the…
For Education, Against Credentialism
Today I’ll be addressing a group of imprisoned students, university administrators, and prison officials to inaugurate the University of Baltimore’s partnership with the US Department of Education and Jessup Correctional Institution to offer Bachelor’s Degrees. We have a few tasks today, including inspiring the students and encouraging the officials that their support for the program…
A mini-review of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education
Progressives are coming around to the idea that higher education is not a great leveler, and the segregated K-12 schools are increasingly a pipeline to prison rather than jobs for the least advantaged.